by Hareem Khokhar

Created on: November 16, 2009

Productivity is a parameter that is observed, evaluated and measured for every employee and by every employer, even though it remains the most vaguely defined criterion. How an employer benchmarks an employee's productivity is as vast a canvass as the history of employer-employee relationship, and to date it remains under the shadow of ambiguity. So does the idea of increasing the productivity itself.

In most of the cases, unknowingly the employers fail to settle the equation between the productivity measure, the actual and ideal input and output of the employee, then further fall in a fix in putting together the relativity among the measured parameter and the factors affecting it. Many a time, the fact may be that the criterion set for evaluating an employee's work is not concurrent with the nature of the job itself e.g. counting units sold by a sales executive in a certain time period, say a week, is apparently a good K.P.I. however other factors such as, economic conditions, pricing strategy, consumer demand, product quality etc, must be taken into account. Similarly time stretched by an accountant in preparing reports, measured in isolation from the huge size of the company departments, unavailability of appropriate software, bulk of transactions etc, would also lead to an unfair judgment. Therefore, the best way to come up with the right measures to increase employee productivity is to first fix the right set of productivity parameters which reflect the employee's performance in most fair and realistic ways. Then comes, the stage of identifying the factors to increase the productivity.

The fair assessment of the employee's work conditions is always a milestone towards working out a productivity strategy. Although the core factors might be contextual, yet numerous general influences play a pivotal role in shaping an employee's overall performance. The foremost is the universally agreed: Motivation. No one can make a person work if he does not want to. And to develop the "want", one must make that person "happy" to go for it. Hence it is always the intertwined trilogy of desire, fruition and motivation that one must deploy to motivate an employee in general.

Many theories over the past have attempted to highlight the factors which would boost up the employees' output. Elton Mayo's famous Hawthorne Studies concluded that the employees' cohesion or team spirit raise the motivational level, and in turn, their productivity significantly. Greater involvement

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